Festive season turns up minimal congestion ‘glitches’

ALAN PEAT UNLIKE MANY previous festive seasons, there were no loud howls of outrage at the port of Durban virtually shutting down over the holidays this past year. While operating on a skeleton staff, the port seems to have been adjusted in such a way that there has been a relatively uninterrupted flow of containers, according to a number of observers of the scene. Spoornet managed to handle the demands made on its railway system, according to Peter Lewin, director of MSC Logistics. “It maintained itself pretty well,” he told FTW. “From a railway perspective, we saw no radical backlog of containers, and no negative impact.” Road transport also ran pretty smoothly, although there was a glitch at year-end, according to Ravi Reddy of container road hauliers International Delivery Company (IDC). On December 29/30, he told FTW, there were trucks parked all the way back from the Durban container terminal (DCT) to well down the Bayhead Road. A queue, said Reddy, which was about seven kilometres long. But this, he reckoned, was probably a result of people trying to get their containers out at the last minute, before they had to pay demurrage, and get them to temporary storage in private sector container depots. According to one of the operations staff at DTB Cartage, there was a bit of a rush, but he had only recorded delays of more than an hour at the peak 14:00 to 15:30 periods of each day. He also noted that the newly opened third lane on the access road to the DCT was getting jammed up over the height of the festive season - just after it opened. At that stage, he told FTW, the policing was still not up to par. Probably the loudest complaint was at the quayside end of the port’s container movement. According to Eddie Hollows of MSC, there was a shortage of staff on December 25, but they managed to keep ship cargo handling up to speed. But, he told FTW, at New Year SA Port Operations (Sapo) only had four work gangs turn out – and this was nowhere near enough to handle the four vessels alongside the DCT quay. “One of our vessels,” said Hollows, “should have sailed at 18:00 on December 31 but only set sail on January 2.”